Fall Comes to California

What a difference a week makes.  Last Monday it was pushing 100 degrees in Los Angeles.  Today it is rainy and foggy.  Very much a tucking up in bed with tea and a good book kind of day.  Too bad most of us don't actually get to do that!  Instead it is just.  THE USUAL.

Thanks everybody for all the very nice and thoughtful comments you made to my last post.  I won't go on and on but compassion and kindness is a quality I will be thinking a little more deeply about for awhile.  I can think of "old fashioned" models of kindness - such as Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck - and/or the characters they have played in movies.  But who do you think of as today's icons or role models for kindness?  We seem to have fewer of them in the public arena.  And when ever are we able to see them demonstrating those qualities?  Do you know anybody that you care about, that has played a role in your community or family, that you could describe with that seemingly old-fashioned expression:  "unfailingly kind"?  I'm not sure that it is a personality trait that is particularly valued anymore.  Was our world a kinder place when more people valued such a trait?   Are there kinder places than others, still in the world?

Anyway enough!  The picture is of San Francisco.  Quite a kind city, no?  In many peoples' perceptions.

I spent the weekend there.  It has become a "tradition" now three years in the making for the Paradise family to attend "Hardly Strictly Bluegrass" a huge, free festival in Golden Gate park entirely paid for by a (what do you think?) very kind Hedge Fund Manager or something (well, rich guy) that features three days of roots music making on six stages around the park.   It is more or less paradisiacal depending on which bands are playing, how warm vs. cold you are, what your seating strategy is, and whether you are Mr., or Ms., Paradis.  This year, Ms. Paradis decided MORE paradisiacal would be just to skip it altogether and spend my brief time there (we had to rush back to L.A. on Sun.) nosing around a neighborhood or two.  

Even though we are in L.A. our life is not sufficiently organized that we are able to get to S.F. more than this one time a year so far.   But it's a city that I love, for it's rollicking style and topography.  No.  REALLY!  Like a roller coaster that town.  And I love to look down it's streets.  Or up it's streets, and see the hills rising or descending and the mists curling around the landscape or withdrawing sweetly to let a pale sun shine in.  I would not want to live there, since it seems to be FALL in S.F. ALL the time!  But to visit, to eat, to labor up and down its streets like my adventuring, enterprising Chinese and Italian forebears (who have so marked that city in delightful and poignant ways), and to feel the beat of the poets in it's pulse.  Yes.  I like that.  Very much.

But anyhoo, how was YOUR weekend?